Nomba has acquired a licensed payments company in Canada, giving the African fintech a regulated base to move money between Canada and African markets.
The deal covers a Canadian Payment Service Provider and Money Services Business. With it, Nomba can hold and move Canadian dollars locally and settle those funds directly into naira and other African currencies.
The setup is built for business payments, not personal remittances.
Trade between Africa and Canada already runs through sectors such as oil and gas services, commodities, consumer goods, professional services and technology.
Payments in that corridor have mostly passed through correspondent banks, usually taking days and coming with high charges and clouded exchange rates.
Nomba says the new structure removes several of those steps. Businesses can open local CAD accounts in Canada, settle directly into African currencies, and receive funds the same day. The company says foreign exchange and transaction costs can drop by as much as 40 to 60%.
“Cross-border trade payments for African businesses are still built on infrastructure that was never designed for speed or transparency,” said Yinka Adewale, chief executive of Nomba. “Owning regulated infrastructure allows us to remove layers of complexity and give businesses predictable, reliable rails they can build on.”
The company is pitching the service to exporters, importers, professional firms and multinationals trading between Africa and North America. It is not targeting consumer remittance flows.
One early user is a Nigerian oil and gas services firm that bills Canadian clients regularly. Before switching, payments took three to five working days and required manual reconciliation.
With Nomba, the company now uses a dedicated Canadian dollar account and receives funds the same day, which it can use immediately for wages, suppliers or local investment.
“For businesses, reliability matters more than novelty,” Adewale said. “They want payments to settle when expected and funds to be usable immediately. That’s what owning the rails makes possible.”
The acquisition was completed in the second quarter of 2025. Nomba is putting about $2m into the Canadian entity to strengthen systems and expand capacity. In January 2026 alone, it processed $3.4m through the Canadian setup.
“Now that we’ve demonstrated consistent same-day settlement and rock-solid reliability, we’re opening access more broadly,” Adewale said.
“From a regulatory standpoint, all FX operations run through our Canadian entity, which means businesses are accessing fully licensed, compliant cross-border banking infrastructure.”
Canada is the first in a series of overseas markets where Nomba plans to own regulated payment infrastructure. The company already handles trillions of naira each year across payments and business banking in Africa.
In November 2025, it launched operations in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after a year of groundwork. It holds a Messenger Financier licence and an Aggregator licence from the Central Bank of Congo, allowing it to move money in and out of the country.
Payments there run through banks including Rawbank, Equity BCDC and TMB, as well as mobile money services such as M-Pesa, Airtel Money and Orange Money.
Nomba says the Congo launch, like Canada, was about proper management of payments infrastructure rather than market size. Canadian companies source minerals and other commodities from the region, but payments have often been slow and fragmented.
In holding licences in both Canada and parts of Africa, the company says it can offer local-currency accounts, transparent pricing and same-day settlement on both sides.
“Africa to Canada is live,” Adewale said. “Africa to the rest of the world is next. Our focus is building global-standard business banking infrastructure that allows African companies to operate locally while being structurally ready to trade anywhere.”
